Photo: Hotli Simanjuntak/ EPA
IN JANUARY 2005, I attached myself as a volunteer to a team of over twenty Australian surgeons, paramedics, nurses and healthcare managers who had flown to Banda Aceh after the tsunami surged across Aceh’s coastal zones, killing around 160,000 people. The Australian team had set up in one of Banda Aceh’s private hospitals, and there they performed many life-saving operations. They brought a planeload of sophisticated medical equipment and supplies with them, and dazzled the local Indonesian staff with their skills, techniques and treatments.
But – at least when I joined them – no member of the team was able to speak more than a few words of Indonesian. Doctors doing their rounds had great difficulty asking patients basic questions like “Where does it hurt?,” let alone explaining complicated medical procedures or the treatments patients would need to follow after being discharged. Many of the patients and their relatives were distressed that they couldn’t ask the doctors what was wrong with them or about their prospects of recovery.
With no other practical skills of my own to help survivors, it was a great relief to be able to use my knowledge of Indonesian language to work as an interpreter for the Australian team. In doing so, I joined several other Australians – mostly exchange students, NGO workers and the like – who helped out in this way because they happened to be in Indonesia at the time. It was a moving experience to help, in a very minor way, this team of Australian health professionals working in the aftermath of an enormous tragedy. Many of the survivors had horrific lower-body injuries, caused by pieces of tin or other objects in the swirling waters. The doctors performed what seemed to me to be miraculous surgery, patching over gaping wounds and pulling people back from the edge of death. They also treated their patients with warmth and humanity. The memory of the assistance they rendered, and of the gratitude of those they helped, remains vivid.
But the lack of Indonesian speakers on the team struck a jarring note. Certainly, I do not mean to criticise in any way the team members who went to Banda Aceh and performed such great service. I don’t know whether it had proven impossible to find Australian health professionals who spoke Indonesian fluently, or whether doing so had been forgotten in the rush to put the team together. But the absence of Indonesian speakers seemed a sad reflection of the state of relations between Indonesia and Australia: at a moment of such great need, when the Australian government and some of its people were making a generous and life-saving gesture, a basic and serious communication gap remained.
LAST NIGHT, Kevin Rudd launched a major conference on Australia–Indonesia relations in Sydney. No doubt the conference will conclude with many fine-sounding statements about how relations between our two countries have never been closer. Government spokespeople will make much of Australia’s commitment to forging greater understanding of Indonesia.
My experiences in Banda Aceh suggest that in some ways the relations between Australia and Indonesia are much narrower and more fragile than they are often portrayed. But things could get worse still, as one of the unacknowledged foundations of good Australia–Indonesia relations is in crisis. The study of Indonesian society and language has never reached critical mass in the Australian education system. It would be unusual to find an Indonesian speaker in any randomly selected group of twenty Australian professionals in any field. But at least the study opportunity has been available for many years to most Australian university students who want it. Now, Indonesian studies at Australian universities is feeling the impact of a decade-long decline in funding and activity. It is approaching a terminal phase. And not only is the Rudd government doing nothing to save it, some of its policies are actually worsening the situation.
Kevin Rudd has said that promoting “Asia literacy” is a key goal of his government. In a speech in Singapore last August he declared that he was “committed to making Australia the most Asia-literate country in the collective West.” His vision, he said, was “for the next generation of Australian businessmen and women, economists, accountants, lawyers, architects, artists, film-makers and performers to develop language skills which open their region to them.” There are few signs that he has acted to make this happen.
For decades, Australia has been a leading centre for research and teaching about Indonesia. Australian universities have produced a large group of graduates who are fluent in the Indonesian language and understand the culture, history and politics of the country. These people are now a crucial part of the connective tissue at the heart of the Australia–Indonesia relationship. They populate the government departments, businesses, NGOs and the aid organisations that work in or on Indonesia, and they teach Australian school children. European, Japanese and American policy-makers and government officials who visit Indonesia often express amazement at the number of knowledgeable Australians they meet.
This cohort of Indonesia-savvy Australians is an invaluable resource for our country. They are one factor that elevates Australia’s relationship with Indonesia above that which that country shares with other Western countries. Yet the framework that produced this layer of people is now under threat. University after university has either closed its Indonesian program or is considering doing so. Indonesian experts who were trained and recruited in the heady days of the late 1960s and 1970s are retiring and not being replaced.
Less than a decade ago our largest city, Sydney, had Indonesian language and studies programs available at or through all five of its major universities (the University of New South Wales, the University of Western Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney, Macquarie University and the University of Sydney), with full majors offered at three of them. Now a full program only survives at the University of Sydney and the only other university still teaching Indonesian, the University of NSW (which a decade ago had one of the most vibrant programs in the country) has this year replaced its major with a minor. In Perth, a city with an especially large Indonesian community only three hours flying time from Jakarta, Indonesian programs have either closed or are under threat in two of the three universities where they have traditionally been offered. Our third city, Brisbane, used to have three separate Indonesian programs, but these have now been replaced by a consortium arrangement that allows students from Queensland University of Technology and Griffith University to learn Indonesian through the University of Queensland. At Melbourne University, until a couple of years ago another major centre, most of the key staff have retired or resigned and not been replaced. At most universities, staff in Indonesian studies programs sense the axe swinging ever closer to their necks. Nationally, perhaps a third of all Indonesian language courses are under threat of closure in the next twelve months.
In part, the decline of Indonesian studies is a result of funding pressures in a tertiary sector now driven almost entirely by market forces. Long ago, in the 1960s and 1970s, Indonesian studies attracted large enrolments, but it has not done so for decades. Instead, a spread of small programs provided Australia with a steady stream, rather than a flood, of Indonesia-literate graduates. Over the past decade or so, student numbers have dwindled, as students get turned off by the economic, political and security problems in Indonesia.
When added together, though, these many small programs still make Australia the world leader (outside Indonesia itself) in advanced training and research about Indonesia. No other country has the breadth of tertiary sector expertise on Indonesia, and it is this breadth that provides depth for both our knowledge of Indonesia and our varied relationships with it.
But small programs cannot survive when the logic of the market dictates all. Deans in financially pressed faculties have to make hard decisions to balance their budgets. Having to justify to their staff which programs to close, they understandably target the smallest ones first, which means Indonesian studies is often in the firing line. Australia’s foreign policy priorities count for little in such decisions.
In the absence of national planning, Indonesian studies dies the death of a thousand cuts. Here and there, high-flying academics are able to win big grants and carve out temporary Indonesian studies fiefdoms. Others shelter under the protection of unusually sympathetic deans or directors. But they do so with few guarantees of long-term survival, and without the institutional continuity and ballast that has made Australia the pre-eminent country for Indonesian studies.
In this context, it is significant that arguably the only Australian university where Indonesian studies has maintained a major presence and has not declined or experienced significant threat over the last ten years is the Australian National University. The unparalleled depth of Indonesia expertise here is made possible by special federal funding that subsidises the ANU’s Institute of Advanced Studies, one section of which focuses on Asia and the Pacific. Without similar federal priority on a broader level it is hard to imagine a long term future for Indonesian studies at most Australian universities.
In the early 1990s, the Keating government backed its rhetorical commitment to Asia literacy by funding NALSAS, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy. The Rudd government promised to revive this program but has so far only initiated NALSSP, a pale and parsimoniously funded imitation. In the Keating years, the study of Indonesia, and Asia more broadly, experienced a renaissance in Australian universities. So far, despite all the rhetoric, there have been no signs of equivalent leadership from the new government.
More than just sitting on its hands, the Rudd government has actively harmed Indonesian studies in Australia by issuing over-cautious travel warnings to Australian citizens who plan to visit Indonesia. Wishing to cover itself against any risk of criticism for not warning of possible threats, and responding to popular fears aroused by the 2002 Bali bombings, the government has consistently exaggerated the threat of further terrorist attacks. No independent expert on Indonesian terrorism or security issues gives credence to the government’s evaluation of the risks, and the Australian warnings have consistently been more alarmist than those of other countries.
The travel warnings have done great damage to Indonesian studies in Australia: parents forbid their children from studying Indonesian, schools cancel study tours and close language programs, universities ban or restrict their students and staff from visiting the country. The travel warnings mean that, despite all the feel-good talk about better relations and Asia literacy, a culture of fearfulness and risk aversion permeates all facets of the Australia’s relationship with Indonesia, from the top down.
As the Australia–Indonesia bilateral relations conference begins, I can’t help remembering my experiences in Banda Aceh, and Kevin Rudd’s aim of fostering Australian professionals – including health professionals, one would hope – who speak Asian languages. This week’s conference is a fitting time for the government to put flesh on the bones of its rhetorical commitment to Asia literacy. It is also an opportunity to move away from the obsession with terrorism and security that dominated the Howard government’s attitude to Indonesia. Revising the travel warnings would be a start. Putting real resources behind teaching and research about Asia in Australian schools and universities would be even more significant. •
Edward Aspinall researches Indonesian politics at the Australian National University and is the coordinating editor of Inside Indonesia magazine.
5 Comments
Thank you for publishing Ed Aspinall’s timely article. What he says is absolutely right. For years I have been pushing the same barrow, arguing that it is in our country’s national interest, for many reasons, to have a pool of Australians with the ability to understand and communicate with Indonesian people. This was the main message of my doctoral dissertation, which is available to the public online at http://www.library.uow.edu.au/adt-NWU/public/adt-NWU20041006.110804/index.html .
In order to maintain this pool of people with specialised knowledge, it is essential that Indonesian language receive official support. It has suffered over the years from the effects of the lack of effective teaching materials; active prejudice in a portion of the Australian community; a campaign against Indonesia by a large number of influential journalists and Timor activists; the fact that Indonesia has not been able to mount support for the language (unlike, for example, French, German and Japanese); and in recent years the travel advice from the Australian Government. Other things have contributed that I don’t have space to mention here.
The way in which languages are funded in universities (having to compete against other subjects, i.e., having to be taught in the same way as other subjects where two lectures and a tutorial are considered sufficient, and having to be taught in large classes or even on line, conditions which make it difficult to provide students with sufficient speaking practice) also mitigate against the success of the subject. Lecturers are expected to be experts in Indonesian studies, and are not expected to be experts in the language, so it is not surprising that they often are not very effective language teachers.
Over the years, when Indonesian language studies have been promoted and supported, enrolments have boomed, and when that support has been withdrawn, enrolments have shrunk. This is an indication that the subject needs support to survive. The reason is that although it is in the national interest to have a corps of Indonesian speakers, learning Indonesian is not a sure road to riches for individual students.
I had hoped that the Rudd government would support Indonesian language, because Kevin Rudd actually supported Indonesian language teaching in a report he prepared for COAG when he worked for the Queensland government (cf. Rudd, K.M., 1994, Asian Languages and Australia’s Economic Future. A Report Prepared for the Council of Australia’s Governments on a Proposed National Asian Languages/Studies Strategy for Australian Schools. Canberra: National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia). Despite the fact that his own language is Chinese, he was open-minded to the value for Australia of developing expertise in Indonesian language.
Like many others, I have moved out of Indonesian language teaching and now supervise doctoral dissertations in English
Thank you Edward for this comprehensive account of the declining state of Indonesian skills and knowledge in Australia. Your article is right on the mark and reflects the thoughts and anxieties of many of us involved in Indonesian studies. I have recently returned from a semester at Universitas Muhammadiyah as part of the ACICIS program only to find that Indonesian language courses are being shut down at Curtin University. In short, I am dismayed at the treatment of staff and students in the Indonesian Dept at Curtin. The university is contradicting its own goals of providing students with globally competitive, internationally focused degrees by narrowing the options available to students. This is indeed a sad reflection of the lack of foresight by the Vice Chancellor and Pro-Vice Chancellor in the Humanities Dept and the unwillingness of the Federal and State governments to deliver what they have promised to Indonesian Studies, namely $60 million in funding and increased support.
I agree with all these sentiments. I completed a Cert IV at TAFE in WA (I think it was in 2005) but we couldn’t get enough students together so that TAFE could run the diploma Course which was subsequenty cancelled and has never been reinstated. This is an appalling state of affairs as far as I’m concerned.
I can’t see how all this type of thing can do anything other than crystalise the situation in which Australia finds itself in connection with intensive study of Indonesian politics, culture and and language. I plan to undertake a short course in Indonesian at Wisma Bahasa in Yogya later this year and I wonder whether I will encounter difficulties with insurance or anything as a result of the continuing travel warnings. I’m still hoping we’ll see some positive policy moves to actively promote Indonesian studies to redress the decline we have experienced in the last few years.
The content of Edward’s article needs to be shouted from the rooftop of every influential institution in Australia. The actions that have led to the current state of Indonesian literacy in Australia can only be described as vandalism.
Like Ed, I often encounter Indonesians, Americans, Europeans etc in the course of my work in Indonesia who express admiration for the number of Australians they meet with deep knowledge of Indonesia. I can only smile with embarrassment and cringe when I think of the reality. The investment of decades is being used up and thrown away empty.
The Howard government, with its Eurocentric complacency and market-driven myopia, simply pretended that nothing was wrong. The Rudd government has no excuse because it drew attention to the state of affairs when in opposition. And as an Asian scholar himself, Rudd personally should be ashamed.
This needs to be said, and thanks to Ed Aspinall for saying it. But we need to be looking lower down the ladder: why is Bahasa Indonesia not being taught in our primary and secondary schools? We know that the younger you start, the easier it is to learn a foreign language (even pre-schoolers can learn foreign languages from their class-mates). Bahasa uses a Latin script, has phonetic spelling, is not tonal, and is the language of the Asian country that Australians are most likely to visit. Introducing Bahasa in the primary school would impart Asia-consciousness, and make it easier to learn more challenging Asian languages in secondary school and beyond.
This is some way from the university teaching that Aspinall is talking about, but it is clearly linked to it: the university teaching will be needed to skill the school teachers, and the kids who’ve liked Indonesian at school are more likely to do it at university. And as Joseph Lo Bianco has pointed out, there are different levels of skill, and different reasons for pursuing them. There is a ‘niche demand’ for speakers of particular languages; relatively small for languages like Lao and Khmer, rather larger for Japanese and Chinese, and this calls for focused high-intensity training, not necessarily at university. But alongside this, there is a need for a mass awareness of language and culture as variables, and the sort of language training which gives people enough self-confidence to try to express themselves in a language other than their own. This can be done, and Bahasa is an ideal language for it. When I was visiting Darwin in the 1990s, I noticed that a local high school was in the middle of a full-class exchange with a school in Sulawesi.
The other thing that needs to be said is that the universities themselves must take some of the responsibility for the decline in the study of foreign languages. When I enrolled in Arts I at Melbourne in the 1960s, I had been required to take a foreign language in Year 12, and I had to include a foreign language in my first year subjects. It was felt that some familiarity with a foreign language was an attribute of an Arts graduate. Since then, universities and examination boards have fallen over themselves removing such ‘outdated’ provisions in the interests of ‘flexibility’. Even the much self-lauded ‘Melbourne model’ with its ‘international focus’ does not require students to actually study the language and culture of any other country. Students should be given ‘choice’, between semester-length stand-alone morsels, and not surprisingly, few choose the sustained, disciplined work involved in mastering a foreign language.
The result is that the study of foreign language has been dumped in the Too Hard basket.Less than one in six Year 12 students study a foreign language, and a high proportion of those who do are taking examinations in the language they speak at home. Changing this situation would mean a comprehensive transformation of our approach to schooling, and call for the sort of sustained and well-resourced effort that Dean Ashenden talks about in his article in the same issue of Inside Story (They say they want a revolution, 19 February), involving serious pilot projects that are properly resourced, well monitored and became the basis for more comprehensive change. It will not come from shovelling money to a random array of worthy supplicants. The question is whether Kevin Rudd wants change, or simply a few good headlines.
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